


That Was Then

by TwilightDeviant



Category: Justified
Genre: Abortion, M/M, Mpreg, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 06:15:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24430084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwilightDeviant/pseuds/TwilightDeviant
Summary: Nineteen and pregnant, Raylan saw the potential of his great life recede. He would never leave Harlan, not like that.
Relationships: Boyd Crowder/Raylan Givens
Comments: 3
Kudos: 45





	1. Then

**Author's Note:**

> I refuse to elaborate on this mpreg universe. I just don’t care enough. It’s not the point. It can be ABO if you want. It can simply be a world where male pregnancy is common. I do not care. You choose.
> 
> Enjoy the angst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did tag with "Abortion" instead of only "Abortion Mention" because I understand it is a sensitive subject, but rest assured it is only mentioned as happening and I use no details.

They were kids who thought they were adults. They graduated high school, got a well-paying job at the mines, even moved out of their parents’ houses. Freedom was nothing but the little place Helen liked to rent now that she lived at Arlo’s, but it was theirs. It was Raylan’s, truth be told, but he liked Boyd Crowder enough to let him pay half the rent.

They were kids and they were stupid. They thought they knew everything and yet they learned something new every day. Dark nights in a single bedroom were nothing but the exploration of curiosity and each other. Nothing was supposed to come of what they did. That was how they wanted it.

That was how Raylan wanted it.

He sat on the edge of the bathtub, staring at wallpaper for thirty minutes, probably more. He would stay longer if he thought it was the sort of problem that went away by hiding. Instead, it was one that only got worse the longer he ignored it.

Shit.

That pretty much summed it up. The situation was shit. His choices were shit. His roommate was shit. The future was shit.

There were no prospects with this one. Raylan saw his every aspiration for life shrink to a one-lane road. He was only nineteen, and any potential he might have had outside Harlan wasted away before his eyes.

Pregnant.

Shit.

“Raylan!” Knock, knock. “I’d like to use the facilities, if that’s all right by you.”

“Piss outside!” he yelled at Boyd.

Raylan waited a few minutes more before washing his hands and vacating the bathroom. He needed a drink.

“Damn, don’t you look white as a sheet,” Boyd remarked as he passed through. “You sick or somethin’?”

“Or somethin’.”

His hand grabbed a glass and reached past the bourbon bottle for the tap. Raylan ran himself some water he did not want. He was thirsty though, so he drank it down and placed his empty glass in the sink.

Shit.

“Hey, asshole,” he said as he leaned in the doorway between kitchen and den.

Boyd continued watching television. “If I look up when you call me that, I own it,” he said. He refused to respond to the address.

“Hey, Boyd.”

That bought his attention and his eyes. “Yes, Raylan, my dear?”

There were considerate ways to announce it. There were romantic ways. Raylan landed on, “I’m pregnant.”

“Uh, I...” Boyd grabbed the remote control and turned off the television, convinced its background noise made him hear that wrong. “Come again?”

“You... got me... pregnant,” Raylan said, repeating it in a way that shifted blame quite nicely, “asshole.”

“Wha... I...”

“If you ask ‘how?’ so help me God,” Raylan threatened.

Boyd climbed to his feet with a burdensome weight of thought pulling against him. “A baby,” he considered, speaking low as he contemplated that spontaneous development in their not-relationship. He smiled wide and bright those pearly teeth and laughed. “That’s fantastic!”

There could be no mistaking the nature of his exhibit. Boyd was, somehow, excited.

“Come again?” Raylan questioned. It was not the reaction he expected. It certainly did not match his own.

“Well, it- it- it’s not ideal,” Boyd acknowledged. “It’s not perfect, but...” He could not quell that jaunty grin. “A baby! Hoo!” He crowed at the ceiling like a rooster at the dawn. “Hah!” he laughed again and clapped his hands together. Boyd went to Raylan, and before the man could stop him, there were arms wrapped around his back as Boyd lifted him off the hardwood and spun them in a circle. “Finally, something good to come out of this godforsaken life of ours.”

When he sorted through his own response, when he anticipated Boyd’s, Raylan had the errored conjecture to predict a ride to the clinic, not a celebration.

“Put me down, please.”

Boyd apologized and placed him back on solid ground. Raylan wanted to slap the stupid, happy grin right off his face.

“Well, we- we gotta get married,” Boyd carried on, so distracted by himself, so wrapped up in joyful dreams, that he did not see the other demeanor so contrasting to his own.

“Married?” That morning, Raylan let himself suspect his darkest dread. Now, barely twelve hours later, he was pregnant and married and caged up in Harlan, Kentucky.

“Not right away, of course,” Boyd allowed, sensing, for the first time, that Raylan was not entirely on board with a shotgun ceremony. “We got time if we wanna take things a little more slow. How far along you say you were?”

“I didn’t.” He had no idea, but the casual sex with Boyd began nearly two months prior, and that marked the beginning of a time frame.

“Okay,” Boyd nodded. “All right, well, we can still work with that.” He gave Raylan all the time he needed, thinking it would count to something like a week or two before they started making the guest list. “And if the gossipers go on about that baby bein’ two months early and nine pounds heavy, I say let ‘em talk.” Boyd imagined himself as so progressive while still conforming to the ways expected by their rustic society. “A baby!” he hollered to the room and in Raylan’s ear.

“All right, all right, just...” Raylan put a hand on his friend’s bony shoulder to calm him down. “Can you do me a favor and not go tellin’ anybody just yet?” he asked. “I’m not too keen on this gettin’ back to Arlo.”

“Yeah,” Boyd quickly, considerately agreed. “Yeah, yeah, of course, Raylan. No tellin’ how your daddy’s gonna react when he does find out.”

Raylan did not let himself contemplate how Bo Crowder would take the news either, but it would probably sit a scooch better with his son not being the one pregnant.

“Yeah, no tellin’,” he concurred.

Raylan did not want to spread the news to anyone. He regretted telling Boyd. Already, nothing was going like Raylan wanted, and if he could turn the clock back thirty minutes, he would. Two months would be even better.

Time just kept marching forward in defiance, forward to his future.

Boyd wanted to celebrate what he alone thought was a happy occasion, but without alcohol, there were not many ways to do that in Harlan County. He decided on sweet, praising touches to his partner’s body, touches which Raylan resented for the emotions behind them. It moved on to something more and in the bedroom, and the damn act that got them into that mess in the first place was permitted.

What more could go wrong from it? The worst was on its way.

Raylan did not care for the tender and almost expectant way Boyd touched his stomach.

He did not care for that at all.

* * *

Everything changed without a moment’s consideration that Raylan might want them to stay the same a little longer.

The men at work looked at him no different. Only he and Boyd knew, after all. But Boyd’s treatment made up for that normality.

“I got it,” the man volunteered when Raylan grabbed a piece of machinery just heavy enough to make him let out a groan.

“No, I got it,” Raylan insisted. He pulled on the equipment to retake it from his overly considerate devotee. They struggled over ownership until spectator eyes turned on the squabble. Raylan had to let go. The last thing he wanted was people searching for the source of their argument. He let Boyd take it. “Yeah, thanks.”

That bird was not going to fly.

Boyd did little things for him all day— big ones too. Surrounded by groups of other men in a closed space, Raylan never was able to pull him aside about the treatment. All he could do was grin and bear it.

The behavior did not end when the whistle blew, when they rode back out of that mine and walked by the after hours, unofficial watering hole.

“No ‘shine for me and Raylan today, boys,” declined Boyd.

Raylan frowned.

He did not actually want to drink that rotgut moonshine, not with his current predicament or state of mind, but he hated Boyd turning the offer down for him. He gave the man what for once they were in the truck.

“What’d you go and do that for?” Raylan demanded.

“Well, you can’t be drinkin’,” Boyd replied, treating the fact as obvious as it was, “and I thought it might look a little less suspicious and a little more gentlemanly if I turned it down with you.”

He was not wrong, and with any other outlook, Raylan would think the self-sacrificial gesture was sweet. That was not his mind, however, not anymore, not for the time being. As it was, Raylan only saw it as one more aspect of his life he was not allowed to control.

“So you’re not gonna be doing any drinking at all for the next nine months,” he scoffed, “that right?”

“Well, let’s add up that math now, Raylan,” Boyd reasoned. “’Cause way I see it, that sum’s already gotta be down to eight months— maybe even seven.” God, he was right, and every passing day took another sliver from one bank of time to fatten up the other. “By the way, you thought about goin’ to see a doctor yet? They might be able to give us a better finish line to look at here.”

“Not yet, no.”

“You want me to ask around for a good one?”

“No.”

“Sorry, you pissed at me?” Boyd asked, taking clues from Raylan’s tone and clipped sentences.

He was, truth be told. There was a full stock of aggression Raylan could expend that passed the barrier of what was fair. It would be so easy to take everything out on Boyd if he let himself.

“I’m tired, Boyd,” he huffed. “Just got off work.”

“And pregnant on top,” the man grinned.

“Yeah,” Raylan muttered, “that too.”

He was pregnant, and the clock never had moved so fast.

* * *

If Raylan were very unlucky some days, he went to work when Boyd was scheduled off, and when he came home, brother Bowman would be sitting on their couch.

“Raylan,” Boyd greeted when he walked in the door.

“Boyd,” he returned, “Bowman.”

There were not many things Raylan wanted more in that moment than a hot shower and completely missing any chance of conversation with Bowman Crowder. He passed them by on his way to the hall. When he drew even with the kitchen, he heard, “Hey.” Raylan stopped.

Bowman raised a nearly empty bottle at him. “Grab me another beer, will you, baby?”

“Grab it your damn self,” Raylan replied. He despised Bowman and loathed his visits, but he put up with it all for Boyd’s sake.

A huff and a scowl came out of the boy but Raylan dismissed them. Anything would have gone ignored by him, anything except, “Not surprised. Bein’ that way always makes ‘em moody as hell.”

That stopped Raylan in his pace, foot dangling midair. Slowly, he spun around to glare at the boy who let beer and arrogance do his talking. “What the hell did you just say?”

“Raylan,” Boyd intervened, “it don’t mean nothin’.”

“I ain’t talkin’ to you,” Raylan growled. “I wanna know what _he_ just said.” He pointed one intimidating finger at the interloper, a non-intimidated little pissant who stepped to his feet.

“I said,” Bowman repeated, not knowing he was really supposed to shut up, “bein’ that way always... makes ‘em moody.”

Raylan slapped the beer out of Bowman’s hand when he tried to drink it, a swallow to reward his petty pleasure. Glass and alcohol tumbled to the floor and spilled but did not break. The retaliating punch was imminent, but Boyd stepped between them before it could land.

“Bowman,” he said, “I’m thinkin’ you best ought head on home now.”

“I’ll leave in just a minute,” he spat.

“You’ll leave now.” The floor was not open to the politics of debate. Bowman was outnumbered two to one and both of them older than him, bigger too.

The high schooler glared at Raylan but smiled and nodded at Boyd. He left them, but the cocked gun of his temper hardly felt holstered. Raylan had some of that himself, and he turned it on Boyd as soon as a truck door slammed shut.

“You told Bowman.” Rage radiated off him like heatwaves off a car.

“Well hell, Raylan!” he exclaimed, somehow making himself the wronged party. “Only fair I get to tell _somebody_ don’t ya think?”

“No!”

“I’m sorry I told, but it ain’t gonna hurt anything, aside from that boy givin’ a little lip.”

“Doesn’t hurt anything, no,” Raylan said, “not until Bowman tells Bo and Bo tells Arlo and half of Harlan knows before the week’s out.”

“Bowman can keep a secret,” Boyd promised, putting too much stock in his idiot brother.

“Bowman can keep a football under his arm when a couple hundred people are watchin’, and I don’t count on him for much else,” Raylan argued, “least of all keepin’ something a secret.”

“So what!” Boyd retorted. “Like they ain’t all gonna know eventually.”

Still, he refused to see that Raylan wanted no one to know, that he wanted there to be nothing worth knowing.

In the ensuing and strained silence that followed between them, Boyd did see it, but he blamed the wrong reason.

“Why the hell is it you’re so ashamed over the fact it was me got you pregnant?”

When more than a quarter of their graduating class was already on its first child, the stigma of teenage pregnancy was lost on Boyd. What he did understand, however, were the upturned noses that came at the Crowder family and association with them. He was justified thinking Raylan hesitated marrying into that and sharing its progeny— not that the Givens name was up on some pedestal in their town.

“It’s not... about... you,” Raylan emphasized. He did not know how much more clear he could be without spelling everything out, piece by piece.

“Well, what’s it about then, Raylan?” Boyd asked. It was only fair he got to ask.

Raylan could come clean. It was the perfect opening. Boyd might even understand everything if he poured his heart out well enough.

He might not.

He might dismiss Raylan’s reservations as butterflies and nerves. And that silver tongue of his would go to work making everything seem all right. It would all work out. Raylan might even believe him at the end, and by the time that speech fog cleared from his brain, it could be too late to do anything about anything.

Raylan shook his head, his answer nothing more than the petty, “Guess I just get moody when I’m like this.”

* * *

“Boyd, you awake?”

“Yeah,” replied the man, giving a tired voice to imply that was only half so. “What’s up?”

Raylan hesitated, knowing that what he had to say carried an unfair amount of weight, but his timing of it was on purpose, so that he might dismiss the notion as some sleeping thought.

“Let’s leave.”

Boyd removed a hand from Raylan so he could rub at his tired eyes. “Leave where? What, you wanna buy us a house for the baby, instead of livin’ here at your Aunt Helen’s?” His excitable ignorance misunderstood. “We make good money, Raylan, but you’re gonna have to quit the mines soon. I don’t know if we need to be takin’ on something we might not be able to afford down the road.”

“No.” Raylan removed himself from Boyd’s arms and rolled over to sit up in bed. “Let’s leave Harlan, leave it all. There’s a whole goddamn world out there, Boyd. You really happy stayin’ here the rest of your life and never seein’ that?”

Sensing a conversation too heavy for pillow talk, Boyd sat up next to him, wide awake now. “What are you saying?” he asked.

“I’m sayin’ let’s leave,” Raylan repeated. “Let’s pack up and just get out of here, go someplace people don’t know us or our families, where they don’t give two shits if a baby’s born seven months into a marriage— or if we get married at all.”

“And what magic land is that, Raylan?” Boyd could not imagine such a progressive place outside of television programs.

“I don’t know yet, but that don’t matter,” Raylan asserted. “It’s not here though, that’s for damn sure. Don’t you wanna get away from this small-town bullshit and see what all’s out there?”

“Course I wanna see the world, Raylan,” he insisted, “but let’s try and focus on one thing at a time, all right? World’s still gonna be there when the two of us make three.”

“We could be making something of ourselves _for_ the baby,” Raylan argued, though what he said and what he thought were distinctly different. What he thought to say was they could make something of themselves in spite of the baby. “We can leave here, find us a place in the city, go to college, _be somebody!"_

“Go to college?” Boyd laughed. “Who in the wide world is payin’ for all this, Raylan?” Their fathers had ample money that would not be loaned. “Who’s gonna look after the baby while we’re at school if you up and take us away from all our family?” A babysitter or daycare was another expense. The funds they barely had to begin with were already wearing thin.

That was that.

“We can’t do it,” Raylan realized. It was a nice dream when he let himself imagine having everything. Now, he felt it slipping through his fingers yet again, like a mound of dry sand he could not grasp, that filtered further away the harder he tried. None of it worked together.

The flame of devil’s advocate went out in Boyd when he saw that forlorn expression in the dark. “Baby, if that’s what you wanna do, then we’ll do it,” he promised, “but we also gotta be smart about this, all right? Now just ain’t the best time.” He was right. He was practical. “It’s all still gonna be there when we’re ready for it.” Boyd touched Raylan’s shoulder and let long fingers drift down his arm, beckoning him down, encouraging rest. “Make somethin’ of ourselves,” he vowed. Raylan fell back into cheap mattress and listened to siren tongue. “Be men that’ll make our kids proud.”

He meant it all. Boyd truly thought they could have a child and the rest would be there waiting, that it would not be pushed back and pushed again behind one excuse after another. Boyd’s order of operations was a pipe dream.

Raylan might have been able to pull it off, having a baby and aspirations. He could go to college if Boyd was there with him to help take care of the thing. It could work, but only if they both wanted the same thing and wanted it just as intensely. They did not. Each one held a different priority in the dominant hand. Raylan was fooling himself thinking any different.

It never would have worked, really, but it was one more optimistic lie Raylan sold himself.

The last lie.

* * *

Raylan made his own way down there, but Aunt Helen had to pick him up. She asked no questions, having all the answers. The name and reputation of the clinic told her all she needed to know.

“I won’t say it was the right choice,” she lectured him, “but I won’t say it was the wrong one either.”

She knew a baby in Harlan meant the person never got to leave. She knew Raylan was not a man meant to stay.

“Boyd?”

“Yeah,” Raylan confirmed. He lived with the man, and math was simple.

On that admission, she reiterated, “It wasn’t the wrong choice.”

He needed to hear that. If sensible, he would have asked her for its repetition the entire drive home.

It was not the wrong choice.

But could he call it the right one?

Boyd came home covered in black dust. All the gloves, masks, and coverings never could keep coal from clinging to the living who disturbed it. Because of that, their rented house always kept a smudge of black, even with those after-shift showers in the mine. Boots stayed out on the porch. Boyd entered in gray-stained socks and went right through to their shower, passing the man laid out on the couch.

Raylan picked a day where Boyd was scheduled to work and he was not. He did that on purpose.

They were neither one cooks, but Helen made a pot roast before she left, something Raylan could maintain if all he did was poke at it. He managed.

“Somethin’ smells good.” Boyd paraded from the hall a cleaned and jubilant man without one care in the world.

Raylan did not remove the pillow from his face. “Yeah, help yourself.” He was tired, and he was sore. All he wanted was to continue lying quietly on the old sofa. The last thing he needed was the conversation that had to happen.

“You all right?” Boyd asked, every ounce that doting father-to-be, as he imagined himself. He sat on the edge of the middle cushion in all the space Raylan did not occupy. “Baby givin’ you fits or somethin’?”

“No, Boyd.” Raylan hid behind his pillow until finally he removed it. The light hurt his eyes. “No, it’s not.” He pushed the man forward so he could find the room to sit up beside him. This was not a laying down conversation. Raylan looked at his hands folded between spread legs. He inhaled. “The baby’s gone.”

Boyd blinked, broken thoughts trying to manifest behind those confused eyes. “What’s that mean, ‘Baby’s gone’?” Even without specifics, he knew, and he was upset.

Raylan had no heart and no strength to give his selfish truth, so he spoke the lie he spent days rehearsing. “Something felt off this morning,” he said, “felt wrong. I asked Helen to take me over to the doctor’s.”

“What- what...” Boyd scrubbed a hand over his face. His movements turned jittery, restless, and he stood up to relieve the pressure in his limbs. “What’d they say exactly?”

“Exactly?” Raylan shook his head. “Don’t know. Wasn’t half-listening.” He let fictitious shock give reason why he had no facts to share. “But I lost it, okay? Baby’s gone.”

The baby was gone.

Boyd was heartbroken and wanted to show it, but he knew he was supposed to look strong for Raylan. It was backwards and unfair as hell. Boyd was the one who needed consoling after what Raylan did to him. He could not tell him that, not without abandoning the entire fabrication and facing the fallout. It was better this way, for both of them.

“Raylan, it’s okay.” A hesitating hand brushed Raylan’s arm as though he were some frightened animal at risk of biting. Boyd was allowed to touch. “It’s okay, baby.” He knelt and embraced Raylan, enveloping him in supportive arms. “It’s okay.”

“I know it’s okay,” Raylan bit back. He resisted the hold around him, keeping tense within its comfort. “I’m fine.”

“Well,” Boyd replied in a soft, gentle tone, “I’d believe that if you weren’t cryin’.”

What?

Raylan pressed a hand to his eye and it came away wet. “I didn’t...”

“It’s gonna be okay, Raylan.” He kept repeating that, and while Raylan did not believe him, it was good to hear.

“I’m sorry, Boyd.” He meant it, and he had to say it.

“It’s not your fault.” It was. “Not your fault, Raylan.”

He should have been telling that to Boyd, but the comfort, the strength was all turned around in unfair gestures.

Raylan managed to quell his tears once he knew the faucet was on. He sniffed and wiped at his eyes. “I’m good.” Boyd did not believe that but let go to lean back on his bent knees.

“I’m gonna plate you up some of what’s in the kitchen, all right?” he offered, defaulting to obvious caretaker responsibilities.

Raylan shook his head. “Not hungry.”

“Now, I don’t know the doctor’s orders,” Boyd replied, “but what’s in there smells pretty damn good. Sure I can’t get you some?”

Raylan laid down and grabbed the pillow to cover his face. “Doctor said I can do whatever the hell I want.”

That was the problem, really. Raylan could do anything he wanted— and he did.

Boyd left him to his rest. He ate at the kitchen table when, more often than not, the two teenage bachelors tossed manners and had dinner right there at the television. Either Boyd wanted to give Raylan quiet or he wanted to give himself some seclusion to think.

Silverware clacked on a glass plate, over and over. Eventually, water hit on it from the tap in the sink. The plate was left there, Boyd’s lowest priority in life.

He did not encroach on Raylan again, leaving the couch to him in solitary sanctuary. Boyd sat in the beat up, threadbare chair near Raylan’s head. Thought consumed an already overactive mind.

Boyd thought about what happened. He thought what could have been. He thought what would not be. Raylan cut that thread himself.

When he first found out about the pregnancy, he saw all the possibility of his life reduced to a single outcome. That morning, he took steps to reopen all the doors in that long hallway of his life. Only now did he realize how he locked one up, sealing it away for good. There was no going back.

But he did not make the wrong choice.

“Raylan...” Boyd hesitated. He arrived, at last, to some words he could say. Somehow, he managed to say them. “When you’re ready and... if you want... we can always try again.”

When he grew older, Raylan saw the proposal as the innocently wrong words of a dumb kid who did not know what else to say.

On the night it was said, it scared him shitless.

“Boyd, I don’t...”

“I’m sorry,” came the quick reply. “That sounded better in my head. I’m sorry, Raylan. You need time.” He understood but did not understand.

“Yeah.” It was true. “I need time first.” He needed five or ten years of it. Maybe after that he would be ready to have a kid.

Maybe not.

He only knew nineteen was not the age and Harlan was not the place.

They would never be.

Raylan already told the boss he was not going into work the next day, maybe not the one after either. He was tired and sore and just wanted some rest. When he told that to Boyd and asked the man to sleep in his own damn bed for once, the request was understood and obeyed. But Boyd reminded that he was right down the hall if needed.

Raylan was half-asleep when he heard glass shatter. On instinct, he thought intruders, but the hush after told him it came from inside the house. It was Boyd, breaking things on accident or on purpose. Raylan turned over and closed his eyes.

They would have to talk about it eventually, in some form or other, but for the time, Raylan did not want to and Boyd did not press.

After a few days, their friendship recovered to its former glory— but not the rest of it, never again.

It was for the best.

Raylan actually thought everything might go back to normal, more or less. A shadow hung over him and Boyd, accentuated by the way neither of them spoke about it. But because it was not mentioned, it could almost be as though it never happened.

One month of ignored tension at home and hard work in the mines went on as scheduled until peace was disturbed once again. It was a day like any other until the rock cavern around them began to shake and threaten. Raylan and Boyd dropped everything and ran, taking off down the tunnel as fast as they could, holding hands so they knew their friend was right there with them.

Raylan had never been so scared in all his life. It was not a fear, not a trauma that left them easy, not even when they saw the sun and felt the wind.

They hid in Raylan’s bed, clinging to each other like two kids afraid of the dark, hearts working overtime in their chests, beating out the knowledge of their mortality. They held one another to prove his friend was alive, a tight constricting grip with only dirty work clothes between them. Those sheets would never wash clean, but it was the absolute last thought on Raylan’s mind.

He almost died.

Boyd almost died.

And the coal was not worth that, not by a longshot. Raylan knew when he left the mine that day he was never going back in. There were a thousand better ways to die. He would not volunteer for crushed and suffocated miles underground.

Boyd kissed his face and held him through the night. Raylan did not know how to tell the man he was leaving Harlan, the sooner, the better.

Aunt Helen read his mind several miles away. She showed up at the front door the next morning and pulled Raylan outside. A quick scowl was sent at Boyd on the couch, that kid who tried to chain her nephew to this toxic way of life.

“Here.”

She offered Raylan the money he paid her in rent all those months, and she told him to take the rest of his savings with some of hers and get the hell out of town. Never look back.

He did exactly that.

And when he went, there was nothing of him left behind but a Dear John letter on the kitchen table. It was worse than Boyd deserved. It was all Raylan had the balls to give. He was a coward for not having a conversation he did not want to have, but at least he knew that. No excuses were made to make it sound like anything other than what it was.

He always wondered, for years after the fact, how Boyd took the news.


	2. Now

**[Twenty-Two Years Later]**

It was a tense car ride.

Raylan never did prefer driving, not even his own car, not if there was someone else he could make do it. The marshal’s chauffeur on that long dark highway on that particular cold dark night was Boyd Crowder.

There were handcuffs connecting him to the steering wheel, prop in a bullshit charge Raylan made up for the sake of inconveniencing Boyd when the man started annoying him. He would be out by the morning, but Raylan liked escorting him across the state as petty punishment.

In that enclosed space and on a drive with two hours left, they had everything and nothing to talk about. For thirty minutes, they let the nothing be said. Eventually, though, the everything was due discussion.

“So you and Ava,” Raylan muttered without preamble. It made him wonder where the girl’s head was, going with another Crowder, even if this time she did choose the better one.

“What, you jealous?” the man returned.

Raylan chuckled. “Sure, Boyd.”

Maybe he was jealous of them both. Maybe he was only jealous of Boyd. Maybe he was jealous of Ava. Somehow, she found satisfaction from staying in Harlan, from being with Boyd, from choosing that to be the punctuation at the end of her life. He wondered how she managed positivity on such an outlook.

“Could’ve been us,” Boyd said, reading his mind, “some half a lifetime ago, at least.”

“Could’ve been,” Raylan agreed. He stared out through the windshield, trying to convey through speech and posture that it was a casual topic and yet one he did not wish to discuss.

“I take it from your tone that it’s not somethin’ you think about too often,” Boyd remarked. He took his eyes from the straight highway road to glance at his passenger.

“Do you?” Raylan did not want Boyd’s answer, but it was preferable deflecting from his own.

“As often as might be imagined from a weak and nostalgic man,” Boyd confessed. “Sometimes less than that, sometimes more.”

“In other words, yes?” Raylan interpreted.

“There was a time I didn’t think about it hardly at all,” Boyd said.

“That so?” He nodded. “But I’m guessin’ whatever you have goin’ on with Ava’s been putting the thoughts back in, that right?”

“That’s wrong,” Boyd stated. “It’s been in the back of my mind since the day you showed up back this side of Kentucky.”

“I see,” Raylan replied, “and did that have anything to do with you threatening me to get out of town almost soon as I arrived?”

“Oh, I’d say it was contributory, perhaps.”

Boyd did not want to think about their past together, their abandoned future. At least that made two of them.

The truth was past due, Raylan knew, and he thought that, finally, it might be time for him to come clean. Boyd was finally moving on with himself, moving on with Ava. Not to mention Raylan stopped caring a long time ago if he hurt the man’s feelings. The power they had over each other was nothing but a dying ember. One man to another, Raylan could tell him.

He could tell.

“I didn’t lose the baby,” he confessed, killing that all-important secret after more than two decades.

Silence.

Only the delicate rumble of a maintained automobile.

“I know,” Boyd replied, surprising Raylan but not shocking him. He knew. He already knew!

“How?”

“Oh, it took me years to see it, mind, few more to convince myself. But I did put it all together eventually.” There were nothing but analytics in his voice.

“And how’d that sit with you when you did see it?” Raylan asked. He could not tell and he wanted to know.

“Well, I got real mad at you, Raylan,” he admitted. “Then I got real drunk. And then I got in my truck headin’ down to Texas, aimin’ to give you a piece of my mind.” Raylan counted his blessings that particular scene never went down at the Marshal’s office in Texas, which was no doubt the best lead Boyd had on his location at the time. “Sobered up before I made it,” he continued. “Pulled off on the side of the road, watched the sun rise. And in that moment of silent and pensive reflection, I decided the better punishment for you, Raylan Givens... was lettin’ you stay guilty over what you’d done to me and our baby.”

“I don’t feel guilty,” Raylan said, a lie then and maybe one now. “And you’re a damn fool if you think that baby would’ve had any sort of life bein’ raised by us, two dumbshit kids with drug dealers for daddies and me wanting out of Harlan while you wanted to stay.” It never would have worked. Raylan could admit that even when Boyd would not.

“I want my apology.”

“Excuse me?”

“You let me get excited for a baby you weren’t never gonna keep,” Boyd said. “You owe me an apology for your cold-blooded actions, Raylan. I want it.”

“Yeah, well,” Raylan replied, “you go want in one hand, spit in the other, and let me know which one fills up the fastest.”

Boyd huffed a laugh. “You really don’t feel no guilt, do you?”

“It had to be done,” Raylan stated for the reasons already shared, knowing there were several more.

“No,” Boyd disagreed, “you wanted it done.”

“I didn’t _want_ —” Raylan stopped his temper. That was a pointless argument to pursue. “Wanting a life away from here,” he said, “needing one, it doesn’t mean I was waitin’ in line to pay the price.” It did not matter if Boyd believed him, and yet for some reason, he wanted him to. “It was never meant to hurt you, so pull your head out of your ass about it.”

“And how was that not gonna hurt me, Raylan?” Boyd countered. “Why even tell me at all if you were just going to—”

“Because you took it the wrong way!” he shouted. When Raylan inhaled, the breath shook with traitorous emotion. “You weren’t... supposed to get excited about it.” On that cruel day long ago, Raylan thought he was recruiting someone to be in his corner, to reassure him in the choices to come. Boyd was mad at him? Well, he was mad at Boyd. “I was a stupid scared kid, asshole. I _needed_ somebody.”

In the end, he had no one. And he got through that too.

Boyd sighed. “Raylan...”

“Just watch the damn road.”

Boyd could talk and drive, but for a handful of minutes, they pretended he was not so multi-talented. When conversation resumed, it did not pick up where it left off. The topic was the same, but the train of thought left a different station.

“He’d be in his twenties by now,” Boyd said with all the emotion of a man who thought about ages often.

Raylan said nothing, letting the bait dangle there between them. When he did speak, it was for the pleasure of being argumentative. “Or she would.”

“Or she would,” Boyd agreed. His smile came through the darkness. “Probably be drinking by now.”

“First drink?” Raylan questioned. Waiting for twenty-one sounded a little subdued and lawful for their kin.

“Hell no.” He laughed and Raylan chuckled along with him. A hand flexed around the steering wheel, making the handcuff clink. “Smart as a whip,” Boyd decided. With the two of them as parents, there was little choice.

“Usin’ all manner of ten-dollar words,” Raylan concurred. It was not exactly seldom Boyd used words he did not know, and he would probably teach them to their kid to make Raylan feel like an idiot.

“With a college graduation just around the corner.” For all his intelligence, Boyd never did make it to a secondary education. Part of him must have hated Raylan for choosing one over the family they almost shared, but he would insist on it for their child. It was only right to learn from life’s mistakes and stop the repetition. “No drugs,” he spoke, falling into the pit of their childhoods and waxing on how they would have fixed it for the next generation.

“No hittin’,” Raylan added, “no yellin’, no crime goin’ on right in the goddamn living room.”

“Helen’s little living room,” Boyd mused, caught in the memories. “Wood paneling on every wall, too many windows and we covered ‘em all up with sheets.”

“Except for the one with a towel,” Raylan corrected.

They lived in that house such a short time together, but the numerous life events that went with it made a lasting impression. The two weeks they almost had a child built memories that never even happened, that amounted to nothing but dreams.

“You know I wanted to marry you,” Boyd told him.

“I know. You said as much back then,” Raylan replied. “But gettin’ married and staying in Harlan for the sake of some kid wasn’t how I wanted to—”

“You ain’t hearing me, Raylan,” he interjected. “I wanted... to marry you.”

At news of that startling declaration, Raylan really had no better followup remark than, “Why?”

“Because I was a dumbass kid thought he knew what love was,” Boyd answered. He was not ashamed of the fact, even if he learned better since then.

“Probably wouldn’t have ended well,” Raylan considered.

“No.”

Over time, he would have resented Boyd for keeping him there. Resentment would turn to hatred turn to loathing turn to screaming, all in front of at least one kid. Raylan knew that way back when. It was why he did what he did.

“Our lives could’ve been so different if we let ‘em,” Boyd spoke, thinking on all the paths they did not take. “You know, I... I wish you’d never got pregnant. I wish that mine never did collapse. Maybe if they hadn’t scared you off then... I don’t know, Raylan. Maybe you’d have stayed, at least a little longer.”

It was pitiful in a heartbreaking sort of way.

“Might’ve made a difference,” Raylan allowed, “but it never would’ve been a big one.” He may have stayed longer, but he never would have stayed.

“I suppose we never will know,” said the man who told himself he would have felt complete married to Raylan and raising a child spiting every mistake their daddies made with them. He wanted that life because he was never able to have it, and when the current path lacked all manner of roses, neighboring trails always looked the sweeter. Boyd got to look at it, but he would never have it. Because when they were boys, Raylan looked over and saw a different path he liked better.

They always wanted different things, and they made each other suffer for it.

“Boyd,” Raylan spoke, being more serious and more sincere than he wanted, “for what it’s worth and all things considered... I am sorry.”

“I know you are, Raylan.” He knew the truth even with all the prideful, stubborn words Raylan put up between them saying otherwise. He knew they meant something to one another, however sweet or hostile those feelings did manifest. They would always be more than nothing in each other’s lives. “And for what it’s worth,” Boyd extended in return, “I’m sorry puttin’ you in a situation where you felt that was your only choice.”

Boyd’s loss and Raylan’s guilt, maybe both their punishments fit both their crimes. Maybe they both got screwed and nobody won.

Life was what they made it, no turning back.

Boyd’s right hand rested on the center console as his handcuffed left piloted the car. The blue-green glow of dashboard electronics illuminated skin when Raylan took that empty hand in his and held it. Four fingers squeezed back, and a thumb rubbed over his knuckles. The gesture did not mean anything. There would be no great impact. When the drive ended, their lives would revert to what they were before getting in the car. But for the time, for those next two hours, it felt good to hold the man who could have lived another life with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's so sad! ToT
> 
> I know I wrote it, but it's so sad. I just got the idea in my head thinking about Raylan's determination to leave Harlan when he was young but being met with something that would have kept him there. And I want to say "AU where he stayed," but for the reasons I mentioned in the fic, that wouldn't have worked. He would have resented his life and possibly taken it out on Boyd and the kid(s). The best case scenario would be if he got through to Boyd how important it was to leave, and somehow they made it happen. Boyd working to pay the bills while Raylan went to school, both of them staggering their schedules so they could take turns watching the baby. It might have worked (even if it left them exhausted) if they wanted it bad enough, but part of this fic is how they didn't want the same things to the same degree. It's a tragedy, and I own that.
> 
> Anyway, I love comments if you wanna leave me one to let me know what you thought. ♥


End file.
